I spent forty minutes on Sunday trying to establish whether my aunt in Beaverton was currently eligible for a vaccine. Forty minutes, four browser tabs, a county page, a state page, a hospital system page, and a phone tree. I do this for a living. I read taxonomies for fun. I could not get a clean yes or no.
She is seventy-one. The answer should have taken nine seconds.
Somewhere in there I hit a page that used the phrase Phase 1B Group 6 as though it were a thing a human being would recognize about themselves. Nobody has ever woken up and thought, I am a Group 6.
The largest public information campaign of our lifetimes is being run in the internal vocabulary of the organizations running it, and that single choice is costing more shots than hesitancy is.
We talk about hesitancy constantly because hesitancy is a story about other people's beliefs, and beliefs are interesting. Confusion is boring. Confusion is a badly labeled form. But I would guess a large share of the people not yet vaccinated in Oregon this month are not refusing anything. They tried, could not tell if they qualified, got an error, and put it on the list of things to deal with later.
Every state wrote its own phase language. Fifty vocabularies, fifty portals, fifty definitions of frontline. A person in Vancouver and a person in Portland are twelve minutes apart and living in different information systems. Then the national coverage flattens all of it into one headline about eligibility opening, and everyone reads it, and everyone tries, and most of them are wrong about their own status.
Here is what any brand strategist would have said on day one. Do not publish a taxonomy, publish an answer. One question at a time, plain language, ending in a yes with a link or a no with a date. Not a chart. Not a PDF of a chart. Salt & Straw can tell you in one screen whether they deliver to your address, and that is a decision about ice cream.
Do not publish a taxonomy, publish an answer.
The second thing: name the date. People will wait patiently for a thing they can see arriving. They will not wait for an open-ended maybe. Half the anxiety I hear from friends is not about the shot at all, it is about not knowing when they get to stop refreshing.
I got my aunt an appointment eventually. It was at the convention center, and she reported that the operation itself, once you were inside the building, was superb. The building was never the problem. Getting people to believe the building was for them was the problem.
Truffles sat on the laptop through most of the forty minutes. Genuinely not the least useful participant.